Nvidia has dominated the AI chip market for years, but the era of total dependence might be ending.  

OpenAI just shared its plans to spice things up with Jalapeño, its custom inference chip built with Broadcom, joining Google, Apple, and SpaceX in a growing list of companies building their way out of single-supplier risk. The goal is less of a clean break and more of a hedge. Custom silicon means more control, hardware tuned to specific needs, and the kind of performance gains Apple unlocked when it ditched Intel. 

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into what the custom chip trend means for the industry and a few deals of the week worth watching. 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

This will impact Home Assistant users and those who rely on similar third-party tools.

The announcement comes amid a race between organisations to build semiconductors that can handle increasingly demanding AI workloads.

Multinational technology giant IBM has announced the creation of what it claims is the world’s first ​technology capable of producing chips smaller than one nanometre.  

According to IBM, the chip has a transistor architecture of 0.7 nanometres and can hold nearly 100bn transistors on a “fingernail”-sized surface, achieving roughly double the density of its 2-nanometre chip unveiled in ​2021. 

In order to create the chip, IBM reportedly developed a new transistor design called a nanostack, which lays transistors on top of each other in three dimensions, rather than the standard method of laying them flat, effectively fitting more into the same amount of available space.  

Commenting on the achievement, Jay Gambetta, a director of IBM Research, said, “With our new nanostack architecture, we’re not just making smaller transistors, we’re reinventing how chips are built to deliver ​dramatically more power and ​energy efficiency.”

According to IBM, the new nanostack technology will also be capable of shrinking a type of memory circuit called SRAM by 40pc when compared to its previous chip technology. Production is expected to begin within the next five years and the organisation has yet to name a manufacturing partner for this technology, if there is one. 

IBM’s announcement comes at a time when many organisations all over the globe are racing to become the most prominent name in the manufacturing of advanced chip technology and artificial intelligence. 

In late May, leading chipmakers Micron and SK Hynix both surpassed $1trn in market value. Global semiconductor company Infineon Technologies announced earlier in June that it is set to open a new €5bn chip factory in Dresden, Germany, representing Infineon’s single largest investment. Last month, Analog Devices announced it was acquiring AI power delivery provider Empower Semiconductor in a deal valued at $1.5bn.

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from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

flowkey is a fun, interactive piano learning platform that helps anyone go from absolute beginner to confident player — at their own pace. It combines step-by-step courses with thousands of songs you know and love, tailored for every skill level, from first-time learners to advanced pianists. The app listens as you play and gives instant feedback so you can improve faster, practice technique, and master sheet music with confidence. Whether you’re learning scales or your first full song, flowkey makes piano practice easy, fun, and rewarding. A one year subscription is on sale for $40, two years for $60, or five years for $80.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackSocial. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

from the glorified-lapdogs dept

You might recall that one of the conditions of the FCC’s approval of The Ellison family’s $8 billion acquisition of CBS was that the agency would install a “ombudsman” at the network to ensure CBS journalism was appropriately feckless and deferential to our mad, idiot king.

This was particularly ironic given decades of whining by Republicans about stuff like the “fairness doctrine,” and other short-lived government attempts to set acceptable contours for journalistic speech. The appointment didn’t even really appear necessary, given Bari Weiss’ pretty obvious loyalty to oligarchs and autocrats like Trump and Netanyahu.

The guy they appointed, Kenneth Weinstein, unsurprisingly had no qualifications for the role. Weinstein had been the head of the faux-academic right wing Hudson Institute “think tank,” and has absolutely no experience in journalism or television whatsoever.

Similarly unsurprisingly, a new New York Times report indicates that Weinstein has largely been invisible and pointless since his appointment. He doesn’t issue statements, he doesn’t appear to help anybody dealing with internal chaos being caused by Weiss, he doesn’t respond to direct questions from politicians, and he barely shows up at the office:

“In the nine months since he was hired, Mr. Weinstein has issued no public statements about CBS News’s coverage or its controversies. He has not issued any guidance or feedback in staffwide emails or memos, three employees said. He has told some employees that he is scheduled to work only one day per month, two people said, though one said he responded to queries outside his monthly workday.”

As I predicted, there’s just not much for him to actually do at a company that’s innately so dutifully loyal to the nation’s richest assholes. The New York Times at one point seems confused by the idea this “watchdog” does do any useful watchdogging:

“As CBS News has been shaken by infighting between management and its star correspondents this year, Mr. Weinstein’s silence is being criticized by media experts. They say Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, has essentially hired a watchdog who doesn’t bark.”

Of course Weinstein wasn’t appointed to be a “watchdog” or to help the network or its employees. He was hired so that the Trump administration could be ensured a direct line to the leadership of a media company being converted into a propaganda mill, something that’s likely not even necessary due to the ample close connections between the Ellisons, CBS leadership, and the administration.

Weinstein’s other job was to simply ensure that CBS was remaining dutifully loyal to the president, a role that’s also not really necessary since folks like Bari Weiss have no integrity.

The New York Times doesn’t mention how much Weinstein is being paid for his single day of “work” a month, and how many shitcanned CBS journalist salaries it would have paid for.

Filed Under: bari weiss, cbs news, fcc, kenneth weinstein, media, ombudsman, propaganda, the hudson institute

By Maril Vernon, GRC Engineering Evangelist, Anecdotes.

Every vendor on every panel right now is saying the word “agentic.” But most of them can’t explain what actually changes when you stop treating GRC like a filing cabinet and start treating it like a fluid system.

I spent years on the offensive side, red and purple teaming, breaking the controls that GRC teams swore were working. Same findings, same gaps, different quarters. So when I tell you agentic AI is about to reshape how GRC operates, I’m not selling you a buzzword. I’m telling you what I’d be paying attention to if I were still trying to get past your controls.

Here is the honest version of where this goes, and what one of these agents actually looks like when you build it.

What “Agentic” Actually Means Here

Automation is not new to GRC. We have been scripting evidence collection and bolting RPA onto workflows for years. The problem is that most of it just moved the busywork around faster. It still produced static artifacts, still ran on a schedule, still answered the only question legacy GRC knows how to ask: “Did this control pass?”

An agent is different in three specific ways. It has autonomy, so it acts when a condition is met instead of waiting for a human to kick off a task. It has context, so it works against the actual state of your program rather than a screenshot from last quarter. And it executes multiple steps, so it can analyze, decide, and act in sequence rather than dumping a row into a report for you to deal with later.

The systems we are governing have already gone agentic. Cloud is elastic, identity is fluid, infrastructure is ephemeral, AI is non-deterministic, and CI/CD never stops. Attackers figured that out a long time ago but too many compliance programs are still trying to govern real-time systems with point-in-time assumptions.

Now, agentic does not mean handing judgment to a stochastic parrot, in fact most of the work should remain deterministic. The model provides reasoning, summarization, and orchestration. Your controls, thresholds, and policy decisions should still come from humans.

Frankly, this is one of the best use cases for AI in cybersecurity. GRC is full of high-volume, repeatable work performed against known baselines. That’s exactly the kind of problem machines excel at. We already trust AI to help us detect anomalies, prioritize alerts, and sift through mountains of telemetry.

Using it to help analysts identify evidence gaps or trace control drift is hardly the radical leap some people make it out to be.

Bottom line: AI should not replace judgment. It should give practitioners more opportunities to creatively apply it.

Three Things That Actually Change

The analyst’s job shifts from collecting to managing. Nobody gets into GRC because they dream of chasing screenshots and manually updating spreadsheets. The analyst’s job changes, but not in the way people fear.

Agents don’t turn practitioners into passive supervisors. Agents don’t replace practitioners; they give them back the time to apply judgment where it actually matters.

Compliance moves from periodic to continuous. Historically, annual and quarterly cycles existed because humans couldn’t continuously evaluate every control and every change. Agents dramatically expand that capability, making continuous assessment practical where periodic reviews once were the only option.

The moment that constraint goes away, “are we compliant right now” becomes a question you can actually answer, not a snapshot you defend three months after it stopped being true.

Trust becomes the bottleneck. Keep in mind: pass/fail is a compliance outcome. Confidence is a security outcome.

People underestimate this one because once effort is cheap, the hard question is whether you trust what the agent did and can prove it, or did you simply shift the manual work to the verification tax? That is a governance problem, and it is the one worth your attention.

What It Looks Like to Build One

Theory is easy to consume and file away. Here is the concrete version, using Anecdotes Agent Studio, which is the no-code builder my team put into early access. The mechanics are the point, so follow the structure even if you use something else.

Agent development comes down to three decisions:

Pick a trigger. This is the condition that wakes the agent up. It might be a schedule (run every Monday), or it might be an event in your program (a risk level changes, or evidence for a control goes stale past a freshness threshold you set). I prefer event triggers, because they fire the moment something changes instead of waiting for the next scheduled run, which is what makes the monitoring continuous rather than periodic.

Describe the work in plain English. You write the instruction the way you would brief a junior analyst, no code needed. Take ISO 27001:2022 control A.8.5, secure authentication.

The instruction might read: “When the MFA evidence for A.8.5 is older than 24 hours, query the identity provider for the current MFA enforcement policy, compare it against the organization’s required MFA baseline, and if any group has fallen out of enforcement, open a finding and assign a remediation task to the control owner.” Start from a prebuilt recipe or write your own.

Deploy and watch. Now trace what the agent actually does when that trigger fires.

It reads the live MFA policy from your identity provider through the connected plugin (Okta, Entra ID, whatever you run), pulls the current enforcement state for each group, compares it to the A.8.5 baseline you defined, and finds that a newly provisioned admin group was created without an MFA policy attached. It opens a finding, attaches the policy snapshot it pulled as evidence, links it to A.8.5, and assigns remediation to the IAM owner.

Each of those steps lands in an execution log: the trigger event, the data it read, the comparison it ran, the decision it reached, and the action it took.

That single run is the difference between “we passed A.8.5 at the last assessment” and “A.8.5 is enforced right now, and here is the timestamped evidence.”

The Part Security People Will Push On (Correctly)

If your instinct reading this was “I am not handing compliance decisions to a black box,” good. Keep that.

Agentic GRC is defensible for one reason: the work is observable. A useful execution log captures the trigger that fired, the exact inputs the agent read, the rule or baseline it evaluated against, the decision it reached and why, the action it took, and the evidence it touched; all timestamped. That record is what lets you reconstruct any decision after the fact and hand it to an assessor without taking the agent’s word for anything.

Two scoping rules keep it safe. Give the agent least privilege: read-only access to the systems it evaluates, and write access only to the GRC objects it is allowed to create, like findings and tasks. Then gate anything consequential behind a person. Detecting drift and opening a finding can run unattended; closing a risk or marking a control effective should route to a human for sign-off.

Plan for the agent being wrong, because a non-deterministic model sometimes will be. If it opens a finding on A.8.5 that turns out to be a false positive, the log shows exactly what it read and concluded, so you fix the instruction instead of guessing.

An action you can trace is an action you can reverse, and that is why the log matters more than the model.

Where to Start

Don’t start with your highest-stakes control. Start with the task that is high-toil and low-judgment, the one your team does the same way every week and hates.

Think evidence gap detection, extracting findings from audit reports, or generating analysis rules for evidence that has no testing procedure. Prove the pattern there, read the logs, build the trust, then expand.

If you want to go deeper on this, it’s the whole agenda at the GRC Data & AI Summit 2026 on August 12, a free virtual event where security, risk, and compliance leaders work through what being agent-ready actually requires. Save your spot here.

I did not come back to GRC because it was comfortable. I came back because it was unfinished. Agents are the first time the tooling has started to match the speed, scale, and interconnected nature of the systems we’re trying to govern. If you want to see what building one feels like, Agent Studio is in early access now. 

My advice? Build the boring one first. Then tell me what changed.

Maril Vernon is a former red and purple team operator and the Principal GRC Engineering Evangelist at Anecdotes. She writes and speaks on GRC Engineering, continuous controls monitoring, and pushing compliance into the same decade as the systems it governs.

Sponsored and written by Anecdotes.

Acoustic Energy is extending its anniversary campaign with the AE2 40th Anniversary, a limited-edition standmount loudspeaker that will make its world premiere at the North West Audio Show in Cranage, UK, on June 27-28, 2026.

Following the AE1 40th Anniversary in 2025 and the launch of the fully analog AE Active at High End Vienna 2026, the new AE2 looks back to one of the British brand’s more ambitious compact loudspeaker designs—only with considerably more modern engineering under the gloss finish.

Rather than simply dusting off an old badge and hoping nostalgia does the heavy lifting, Acoustic Energy has redeveloped the AE2 around the later AE2 Signature concept. The new speaker uses technology derived from the AE1 40th Anniversary, adds internal steel reinforcement to reduce cabinet coloration, and is positioned above the AE1 for listeners who want more scale, bass weight, and dynamic capability without surrendering the placement flexibility and imaging strengths of a proper standmount.

The AE2 40th Anniversary will be demonstrated publicly for the first time ahead of its wider launch later this summer. Acoustic Energy’s intent is clear: take the compact-monitor attitude that made the AE1 famous and give it enough muscle to annoy a small floorstander.

From Acoustic Energy: “Building on the unprecedented success of the AE1 40th Anniversary Edition, the AE2 uses the same newly developed woofer and tweeter drive units from the AE1. The AE2 40th Anniversary derives from the legacy of the highly renowned flagship ‘AE2 Signature’ model of the 1990s. The same technological refinements from the AE1 have been used to update the performance to today’s level, along with aesthetic detail sympathetic to the original.”

Driver Design

The AE2 40th Anniversary uses the same newly developed tweeter and mid/bass driver platform as the AE1 40th Anniversary, but applies it to a larger offset MTM configuration intended to deliver more bass extension, headroom, and authority. Acoustic Energy has also added strategically placed internal steel plates to reduce cabinet coloration and help the larger enclosure match the quieter, more controlled behavior of its smaller sibling.

The 29mm anodized aluminum dome tweeter carries over the AE1 40th Anniversary’s larger 29mm voice coil and slightly increased radiating area. Like the original AE designs, it is ferrofluid cooled and damped, a combination intended to improve power handling, dynamics, and thermal stability without abandoning the metal-dome character that helped define the brand.

The mid/bass drivers use Acoustic Energy’s spun, hard-anodized aluminum cone design, reinforced with a thick ceramic coating on both sides. The 125mm cone offers more radiating area than the original AE1 driver, which Acoustic Energy says contributes to higher efficiency, lower distortion, and greater air displacement. In the AE2, that shared driver platform is paired with the larger cabinet and twin-driver arrangement to give the speaker more scale than the AE1.

Reduced Cabinet Coloration

Acoustic Energy has scaled up the AE2 40th Anniversary with greater bass extension and dynamic headroom, which the company says should translate into lower distortion through the midband and greater transparency at typical listening levels.

The goal was to retain the tonal character and punchy dynamics of the smaller AE1 40th Anniversary within a larger offset M-T-M driver layout. That required more than simply adding a second mid/bass driver and three front-firing bass-reflex ports. To keep the larger enclosure’s coloration in line with the AE1, Acoustic Energy has added strategically placed internal steel plates to the cabinet structure.

The idea is straightforward: deliver the scale and authority expected from a small floorstander while preserving the low coloration, imaging precision, and placement flexibility that made the AE1 such a compelling standmount in the first place.

Performance and Amplifier Matching

Acoustic Energy positions the AE2 40th Anniversary for listening rooms of around 25 square meters (about 270 square feet) and larger, where its additional bass extension and dynamic headroom should give it more authority than the smaller AE1 40th Anniversary.

Its published specifications support that positioning: a claimed frequency range of 35Hz to 45kHz, measured within ±6dB; 88dB sensitivity at 1 metre/2.83V; a nominal 6-ohm impedance; and 200 watts of power handling. Those are sensible figures for a substantial standmount designed to play with more scale and composure than its dimensions might suggest.

The AE2 is not being pitched as a difficult loudspeaker, but it should reward an amplifier with proper current delivery and some reserve power. The goal is the weight and room-filling authority of a compact floorstander, combined with the imaging, low cabinet coloration, and placement flexibility that remain central to the AE1 and AE2 design philosophy.

Crossover & Cabinet Finish

The AE2 40th Anniversary uses a minimalist, low-order crossover network set at 2.2kHz. Acoustic Energy says the approach is intended to preserve the lively, direct character of the original AE2 Signature, rather than bury the music beneath a small mountain of crossover components.

The cabinet is available in High Gloss Black or High Gloss Walnut, with each finished in ten layers for a properly luxurious appearance. At 385 x 235 x 315mm (HWD) and 14.5kg each, the AE2 is a substantial standmount, but not one that requires a civil-engineering permit before you put it on proper stands.

From Acoustic Energy: “Building on the unprecedented success of the AE1 40th Anniversary Edition, the AE2 uses the same newly developed woofer and tweeter drive units from the AE1. The AE2 40th Anniversary derives from the legacy of the highly renowned flagship ‘AE2 Signature’ model of the 1990s. The same technological refinements from the AE1 have been used to update the performance to today’s level, along with aesthetic detail sympathetic to the original.”

Comparison

The Bottom Line 

The AE2 40th Anniversary is not simply an AE1 40th Anniversary in a larger cabinet with a fancier badge. Its real purpose is to take the newer AE1-derived driver platform and apply it to a larger offset M-T-M design with twin mid/bass drivers, three front-firing ports, and additional steel cabinet reinforcement.

That makes it the more ambitious option for AE1 fans who want greater bass weight, higher output capability, and more convincing scale in rooms of roughly 270 square feet and larger, but still prefer the imaging precision and placement flexibility of a proper standmount speaker.

It is aimed at listeners with a capable amplifier, proper stands, and no interest in buying a full-size floorstander simply because their room needs more than a compact monitor can comfortably deliver. The AE2’s appeal is straightforward: more authority than the AE1 without abandoning the fast, direct, metal-driver character that made Acoustic Energy’s original compact speakers such enduring cult favorites.

Price & Availability

The AE2 is expected to be available by the end of 2026 with a recommended retail price of €2,799 per pair (US pricing not yet available) with a choice of Walnut or Piano Black finishes through Authorized Acoustic Energy Dealers in the US, UK, and Other Regions.

For those attending the UK Northwest Audio Show held from June 27-28, getting a listen to these will be worth the stop. 

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